The history of legal scholarship in the United States can be viewed as a Hegelian succession of theses and antitheses. Formalism was our first thesis about the nature of law, and was soon attacked by legal realism. The insights of legal realism were then integrated into a new synthesis, the legal process movement. Legal process was in turn attacked from the right by law and economics, from the left by critical legal studies, and from the side by postmodernism. To be sure, the assumption that large-scale patterns will be repeated has led to the demise of many politicians and to the bankruptcy of many investors, but it is a tempting assumption nonetheless, because the future is so opaque to us-and so important. If one is willing to make this assumption about legal scholarship, then Neil K. Komesar's Imperfect Alternatives' is likely to be one of the most significant works of this decade. For it is Komesar's ambition to articulate a new legal process synthesis, and to do so by integrating law and economics into the institutional competence analysis that characterizes legal process.'
The first Part of this review summarizes Komesar's book. The second explores its strengths and weaknesses in achieving its own stated goals. The third Part discusses the general contours of Komesar's project in relation to current scholarship in other disciplines. It concludes that a new synthesis along the lines that Komesar suggests is entirely possible, but that such a synthesis would need to draw on many disciplines and methodologies besides the ones that he employs.
